In response to Pam Fillmore's request re: indirect cost disbursement to PIs:

 At the College of Charleston, 50% of IDC goes to the administrative
side of the house.  (Funds are deposited in the general account and are
redistributed as part of the regular budgetary process.)  The other 50%
goes to the dean.  We have given deans the latitude to further share IDC as
they see fit.  Our Science and Math dean keeps 20% of his share and gives
80% to department chairs.  If PIs want any IDC return, they must negotiate
with their chair in Science and Math or with the deans in our other
schools.  The chair or dean is then responsible for doing the bookkeeping
to make sure that the deal with the PI is honored.  We have actively made
the decision that the accounting office and the office of sponsored
programs will not permit individual PI accounts at this time because we are
currently understaffed in both areas and could not handle the
proliferation of accounts that we would expect given our current rate of
growth in sponsored programs.

 I would, however, like to share three areas of possible concern in
setting up individual PI accounts based on past experience:

 (1) What amount of effort will it take to establish, post to, expend
from, and otherwise manage these accounts?  Who will do the work?

 (2) Will the person or office responsible for managing these accounts
have authority that is commensurate with the responsibility?  Who will
monitor the expenditures?  Who will be responsible when the auditors show
up?

 (3) Will the availablility of comparatively large sums of
discretionary funds which PIs may amass over time have any negative impacts
on departmental or school/college operations or on relationships between
the PI, other faculty in the department, the chair, and/or the dean?

 At my previous institution, we shared IDCs with PIs and the
sponsored programs office actually maintained separate accounts for them.
We finally did away with the individual accounts because of the tremendous
amount of work required in our office to maintain these accounts.  We
had well over 200 accounts, requiring quarterly postings and daily
expenditures and it took somewhere between .25 and .50 FTE of an office
manager to manage it all.

 As part of a special operational audit conducted by an external
consultant at our request, it was recommended that the sponsored programs
office get out of the business of managing PI accounts.  The problem
the consultant, a CPA, saw was that, by virtue of administering the
accounts and being the signatory (the accounts were maintained through a
sub-account of the sponsored programs operating account), we had the
ultimate fiscal and programmatic responsibility.  Yet we really had no
say so in how the money would be spent by the PI.

 We once had a PI who used PI account funds to pay for a trip
to another city in a faraway state [which happened to be a very popular
vacation spot] to see how a certain social service project was being
conducted there.  The program to be visited did not seem to be closely
related to anything the PI was doing at the time.  But just being
administrative types, what right had we to question the PI's motives for
the trip and the potential contribution of the visit to the PI's work?
But, since we had signatory authority on the account and gave final
approval for expenditure of the funds, we would be liable for any audit
exceptions.  (The auditor maintained that, even though we required
department chair and dean signatures before we would sign, we would be the
ones responsible in an audit since it was our operating account.)  To
complete the story, we later learned that the PI's spouse had attended a
conference in the same city at the same time.  This sort of occurrence,
while rare, was enough to finally make us agree with the consultant's
recommendation.  We discontinued the practice of crediting IDC to
individual accounts and gave all PIs with current balances three years to
expend all of the funds before we closed the PI accounts.

 I have heard other comments from larger institutions indicating that
problems can arise when particularly active researchers amass small
fortunes in their PI accounts.  It seems there is some concern about the
amount of power a "rich" PI can yield, especially if he/she has more
discretionary resources available than the department chairs.

 Of course, the opposite side of the coin to all this is the tremendous
incentive that IDC sharing can have with PIs and the opportunity it gives
for the PI to do and buy things that would otherwise not be possible.

 I will be interested in seeing other responses to Pam's question.

Barbara H. Gray                                  xxxxxx@cofc.edu
Director of Sponsored Programs                   Phone: (803) 953-5673
University of Charleston, SC                     FAX:   (803) 953-1434
66 George Street
Charleston, SC  29424-0001